TH E O TH ER S I D E
Confessionals BY FRANKI BARKER-JOHNSON ILLUSTRATED BY MIRIAM GAROFALO
“I am the only Confessional Poet” – Anne Sexton.
A
n effective poet, playwright, actress and model, born in 1928 in Newton, America to parents of a violent and abusive nature, Sexton was a multi-talented individual who used various art forms to break from her childhood trauma that lead to mental illness, by escaping into different personas and characters. A celebrity to the literary industry in the 1950’s, Sexton became one of the most honoured poets in American literary history within twelve years of her writing. Sexton’s subject matter and raw, explicit deliverance is precisely what makes Sexton’s work so compelling. The Confessional poem became “an instrument that mirrors and critically diagnoses the culture”. Informed by Freud’s unconscious and Sexton’s own experiences, Sexton’s poems host an uneasy duality of the physical and the psychological; each toying with time, disrupted by memory and informed, yet dislocated by place. Sexton’s Self in 1958 concerns the subject of domesticity; the first half of this essay discusses Sexton’s exploration of the subject using structure, stanza and image. The second half will focus on how Sexton uses voice and style to explore and illuminate the subject matter of mental illness. “The use of le moi,” the self, “was being cultivated in fashionable literary journals everywhere”. Confessional poetry encompasses the socially excluded and observes a
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